


Catch A Falling Knife

by geckoholic



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2014-09-03
Packaged: 2018-02-15 04:35:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2216046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/pseuds/geckoholic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>He can't avert his eyes, suddenly. The back of his head prickles with something that wants to be familiarity, recognition, but all it does is confuse him. He doesn't understand. He squints to read the name under the photo on the tiny screen.</em> Steve Rogers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catch A Falling Knife

**Author's Note:**

> This is kinda what happens when I set out to write 5 times fic. It's more... 5+1+1? Ish? I don't even know. Also, please note that this is Winter Soldier fic and therefore ripe with the issues of brainwashing and dehumanization that the topic entails. 
> 
> Most importantly though, this fic is based on an absolutely gorgeous art prompt by becc_j, which you can check out and shower with love [HERE](http://becc-j.livejournal.com/22645.html). 
> 
> Beta'd by totallybalanced - who has once again turned out to be a lifesaver - and first-read by seratonation. Many thanks to you both! ♥ All remaining mistakes are mine. 
> 
> Title taken from "Catch A Falling Knife" by Filter.

Bucky Barnes wakes in a white-tiled room, surrounded by strange medical devices he couldn't name even if he tried, men in lab coats visible through a glass door. He tries to move, finds himself bound to some sort of chair, a little like those he knew from the dentist's. A lab. Again. This one's a bit fancier than the one in Austria but there's no doubt that he's back under someone's microscope. 

That information has just barely time to register, though, before the pain starts. His own movements are jarring his left arm – or rather the empty space where it used to be. He stares at the empty space next to his torso in abject horror. It _feels_ like he's moving it, as if the muscles respond, but there's nothing _to_ move. He wants to scream, opens his mouth to do so, but thinks better of it – his captors might not have seen that he woke up, and it could be an advantage if they stay oblivious a bit longer. He tests his straps again, trying to lift his left arm, but they give hardly enough leverage to move at all. Frustration and anger build in his chest, stronger and darker than he's ever known it, a blind rage that makes it hard to concentrate and keep a level head. But that's what he needs to do if he wants to have any chance of getting out of here, so he wrestles it down like a physical thing, biting his lip and pushing the nails of his right hand into the flesh of his palm. He closes his eyes, thinks of the last thing he remembers from before he came to: Steve on the train, yelling his name after him as he fell. 

The train. The ice. That's where he lost his arm. He remembers now. And he needs to get back. Steve may be better-bigger-stronger now, but he still takes on every fight regardless of whether he stands any chance of winning. Captain America or not, someone needs to keep him from getting his fool ass killed, and who else is going to do that? Who else is he going to listen to?

Bucky's eyes fly open when he hears someone enter the room. One of the men in the lab coats steps in, grinning viciously. He says something in Russian that Bucky doesn't understand, but it doesn't sound very friendly. 

As he strains against his cuffs again, with no more effect that earlier, more men in lab coats stream in. Two of them hold him down, a third pushing his head back to fit it into one of the devices and putting a gum shield between his teeth. The device roars to live and suddenly there's pain, excruciating and numbing, even worse than the phantom pain in his arm. This time he does scream, but it sounds foreign to his own ears, like the sound of a dying animal. 

When the world goes dark, it's almost a relief. 

 

***

 

He's done his job, one less living and breathing soul in this world, and now it's time for him to be discarded and boxed up until they need him again. There are a few things he knows, even though he's somewhat aware that his mind is caught in limbo, that he's not like everybody else, a slate that's been wiped clean so often that the original surface has started to fade and crack. He remembers things. Nothing important, just this: the lab, the chamber, the procedure. Like an old hard drive that's been been overwritten too often, maybe. A few places don't quite get deleted fully, instead the same things are superimposed time and time again. 

His head hurts, and he remembers that too. It's going to get worse, and then it's going to stop. He is. He'll stop existing for months, years, decades. A tool in a box, stored away. 

The lab is busy, white coats buzzing about and muttering to themselves and each other in Russian. He could understand them if he paid attention to what they're saying, but he doesn't bother. In a few hours, they'll have wiped him again, and he will have forgotten. He does wonder, though, if they know that he's aware of what's about to happen. It's possible they do and simply don't care. No reason to do anything about it, as long as he doesn't resist them either way. 

He did resist, once upon a time. He can't recall how and why, has no actual memories of it, but he knows. It's embedded in him, too deeply to erased. And there must be other things down there, things from before – he has decided there must be a before, is sure he wasn't actually made here, that they took him from somewhere like they do with the girls – but his mind shies away from digging too deep. He can't miss what he doesn't remember. 

And so he sits in his chair, waiting like a piece of livestock about to be led to the butcher. No. It's not quite as dramatic as that. They're not going to kill him, after all. Not really. They killed his mind a long time ago, and he doesn't have it in him to mourn. 

The screens on the wall across from him are new, he thinks. He can't be sure, of course, but the blinking and the beeping doesn't seem familiar. One of the white coats sits in front of it, busily clicking away on a keyboard as the pictures on the screen move and change. He knows some of them from his last mission, identifies a few as medical stats about his own body, his own brain. Others he recognizes in a more abstract way, like he should know what they mean but doesn't. It's not a new sensation. His mind wants to remember. Could be that's where the headache is from: the gears in his head turning too hard in a futile effort to repair what's been broken. 

Another set of pictures, and he's about to close his eyes, shut them out, when two of them hit him like a kick to the chest: one is of a scrawny blonde boy, looking frail and sickish and tired, and the other is of a man that's taller and much stronger but still somehow looks the same as the boy. 

Before he knows it he's shifted in his chair, hands balled into fists. There's a scream logged in his throat, a name he remembers and doesn't remember, and he feels like he's suffocating but he can't get it out. He can't get to it, can't fish the memories out of the murky mess his mind has become. Pressure builds behind his forehead, makes his head pound even harder. He wants to remember with all he's got, and at the same time he wants to ignore this, bottle it up, stick it into a corner of his brain that he won't ever get to. His heart beats against his ribs like a trapped animal and he – 

_doesn't let go of the other kid's lapel until he can hear the teacher yell his name. Adrenaline surges through his small body in waves as he slowly lowers the whimpering boy down to the ground, and that's when his eyes catch Steve's, wide in horror but some how joined by a smile. Bucky grins back, can't not, really, despite knowing that he'll make things worse for himself. The backhand from the teacher is expected, and he feels himself get dragged away as he watches the smile on Steve's face die and get replaced by guilt and embarrassment. He thinks it's his fault, that he should've stuck up for himself even when he got picked on by a kid at least two grades up and_

– the wailing of the monitor next to the chair hauls him back to reality and tries to calm down even though he knows its too late. They'll know. The pictures and the alarm, it won't take them much to do the math and figure out that he _remembered_. It's possible they did it on purpose, a test that he failed spectacularly, and he isn't surprised when he feels a needle break the skin of his arm. They don't do him the favor of knocking him out as they swarm around him though. The sedative numbs him, stills his body but not his mind, and so the image of the boy that he wanted to protect so much that he got into the face of an eight-grader and ignored the trouble he'd get into at school and the dressing-down that'd follow at home keeps swirling in his head as they work. 

It's still with him when they lead him from the chair to the chamber, and it joins his own reflection in the glass right before they put him to sleep. 

 

***

 

There's an aching cold that sits in his chest and wants to make him shiver, unrelenting and so intense that it must be seeping out of his every pore, surround him like a fog. He can't shake it, can't get warm no matter what he does. It's poisoning the air around him and making him freeze even in the heat of his current, subtropic hideout. It has become a part of who he is, always there, familiar. But it doesn't offer comfort, doesn't feel like it belongs with him. It's just there. 

He has been on this assignment for a little over six weeks now, and he can't remember ever being in one place this long before. Then again, he can't remember a lot past these weeks at all, so he could be mistaken. But it seems wrong, somehow. He's a weapon meant to be precise, that much he knows, in and out like a sharp knife aimed at just the right angle. 

He's in a middle-sized town in South America, Nicaragua he thinks, and he hates the heat as much as he hates sitting idle. That's another thing he thinks comes with being dumped here for so long: he can't recall ever being out and about long enough to develop an aversion for something. Get bored. Have time to think about something that's not the how and where of finishing his assignment. 

They are waiting for the right time. He's here to take out a politician of some sort, but there's something the man needs to do before it's his turn to die. Killing him before that is not an option. They were very specific about that, and orders are orders. If they want him to sit around and wait for clearance, then that's what he'll do. He doesn't have to like it. He just has to do as he's told, so he sits in the rickety shack they put him in, on the outskirts of town. It has one room with a cot and a plastic table, a bathroom that barely deserves the name, a shelves stacked with canned food and bottles of water and toilet paper, an old hardline phone, and a TV set put up on the wall. The latter he's probably not supposed to use, but no one explicitly told him not to, so he does it anyway. 

Boredom. He really doesn't like it. 

He snags a can from the shelf, some fruit or other, rips it open with the arm and digs right in with his other hand. Makes a face at the artificial sweetness, but doesn't remember why it offends him or how it is supposed to taste. He sits down on the bare ground and switches the TV on to some sort of news report. 

The headline running through the lower half of the screen – white letters on a red background, signaling urgency in a way he finds obnoxious – announces that they found a man in the ice. There's footage, too, from the cold and the snow, and he shivers involuntarily, the cold within him making itself known again. He's about to switch the TV back off, not enjoying the reminder, when they show the picture of a man in his twenties, blond and ripped, wearing a uniform made of the colors of the American flag. That must be the one they dug out of the ice. 

He can't avert his eyes, suddenly. The back of his head prickles with something that wants to be familiarity, recognition, but all it does is confuse him. He doesn't understand. He squints to read the name under the photo on the tiny screen. _Steve Rogers._

The cold in him grows and spreads, that prickly feeling shooting down his spine. He stands up, paces, sits back down. He wants to turn the TV off, but doesn't get much further than staring at the remote, not pushing any buttons. He – 

_stands in the middle of the Roger's apartment, watching as Steve heaves another piece of wood onto the makeshift fireplace, the only source of warmth in here now that the heating's been turned off. He'd help, but he knows Steve would only make a fuss, insist he can do it alone, doesn't need the help. His pigheadedness is going to be the death of him one day and_

– the phone rings, a tinny and unnerving sound that startles him so much he drops the remote. He hurries to find it, switch the TV off before he answers the call. 

“It's time,” says the voice on the other end of the line, “get it done.” 

He pushes the memory down because he knows it won't do him any good to let it linger, pain and fear pulsing at his temple as he breathes out, and in, and out again and lets the moment pass without trying to hold on to it. He puts on his gear and gathers his weapons and does as he's told, but not before putting the arm through the TV screen and ripping it off the wall, watching with satisfaction as it falls to the ground and shatters apart. 

 

***

 

He thinks he likes London. He can't be sure, can never be sure, his head too much of a scrambled mess with too many blank spaces to sort out what he likes and what he knows and what he remembers, but walking down Whitechapel Road, past the old buildings and through the market, illuminated by street lights and filled with people from all over the world, talking in languages he doesn't understand, feels like it's something he knows. 

He's walking with a violin case in hand that actually hides a sniper riffle, and if it weren't for that fact, he could almost forget who he is and what he exists to do. His target is a drug lord that supplies the wrong people with weapons on the side, and that's about the extend of what he knows about him. But he's got the picture memorized, and he has the coordinates of a drug deal that he's about to be involved in, down in the vip room of some club. There's quite a few of them, different kinds of music wafting through the night as he walks, most of it loud and featuring more yelling and screaming than singing, but it fits the atmosphere. He checks the names over each of them to compare with his intel, peaks at GPS on the cell phone they gave him to make sure he's on the right track. 

This is something else he knows how to do; find his way by nothing but numbers on a screen, calculating his position and direction and the distance to his assigned destination. As he walks, the feeling of belonging recedes, making way for the focus and concentration he needs to effectively do his job. Another glance at the phone, and he slows down, reads the neon signs and plates on each of the buildings more carefully, until he finally makes out right one. The hit is supposed to happen before his target enters the club – hence the riffle – and so he sets up shop on a roof across the street, and then he waits. They have a few tables out by the wall next to the front entrance, a place for people to meet before they go in, have a chat and a cigarette, and he settles in, riffle cocked, squinting through the scope.

That, too, feels familiar. 

He doesn't have to wait long. His target appears with two bodyguards in tow and an asian-looking beauty hanging on his arm, and it's almost too easy: identify, aim, shoot. He goes down like a sack of potatoes thrown onto the street, the girl shrieking and the bodyguards hectically looking around while their boss bleeds onto the pavement with a hole smack in the middle of his forehead. 

While he takes the riffle apart and puts it back into the violin case with a few practiced moves of his hands, he idly wonders what kind of life he must have led that he feels just as at home with a deadly weapon in his hand as he does in the shuffle and scramble of a busy, low-income street market. But he's not done yet, should keep his mind on the mission, the hit was only the first part. Next is a visit to the head quarter of the newly deceased drug lord, back room of a restaurant, to gather intel about his next deals and the people he was in business with, and it's going to be a lot less elegant.

His file gave him a way in through the back, and he squats down by a steel door to assemble his riffle once more. The scope remains in the violin case, along with the silencer – neither will be needed. He yanks the door out of his hinges with the arm and goes in, shooting at everything that moves. No one is supposed to be able to identify him later, leave no witnesses, the most important part of the default mission order that is imprinted onto his brain. Some of them draw on him as well, but they stand no chance; he's too fast. The whole ordeal takes about ten minutes, and then he stands within a handful of bodies in a room with blank brick walls and plastic chairs and tables with bottles and shot glasses on them. According to his file, there's a safe under the makeshift bar, and he unceremoniously rips the old counter apart until he finds it. The documents and records in there go into his violin case, and then he's done. 

He scans the room one last time for survivors, listens close to see if he hears anyone's breathing, nods to himself when he doesn't. He's about to make his escape when his eyes fall to a newspaper on one of the tables, lying next to a knocked over shoot glass and soaking up the liquid that spilled from it. On the front page is a big, full-color photo of a man in a frankly ridiculous looking uniform, all red and white and blue and with a star on the front, above it the headline _Captain America saves New York_. 

He pick the newspaper up and reads the text underneath the photo that tells him about aliens and norse gods and something called the Avengers, then a paragraph about a man named Steve Rogers that lived in the Forties and now lives again. It shouldn't make sense, it shouldn't even sound possible, but the name and the picture jar something loose in his mind. He says it out loud, the name, but that doesn't help. It only makes him feel like he forgot something important. 

It's not a new feeling, and he's never liked it, so he frowns and puts the paper back down before he disassembles the rifle once more, steps over the bodies he's left in his wake on the way in, and hurries to get to his extraction point. 

 

***

 

Over the years he's had many handlers and doctors and people in charge of him, telling him which way to point the barrel of his gun. He doesn't consciously remember many of them, but he does recall that there are things most of them have in common: arrogance, cruelty, the belief that they're smarter, better and more deserving of authority than every one else. Power corrupts everyone, at some point; it's human nature. He's never had the choice whom to follow, and he thinks, as he sits in a basement in Washington and waits to be deployed, that it gave him the ability to look at these dynamics with a certain lack of romanticism. He does not believe. His conscience doesn't matter. His loyalty is an assumed, basic part of his programming. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't resist or defy orders, and so he doesn't need to be convinced. 

Alexander Pierce isn't one of the leaders who love the sound of their own voice, holds his card close to his chest and doesn't have anyone who knows everything that he does, or even enough fragments of the whole picture to take over in his place. He doesn't trust anyone. If he dies, Hydra isn't going to fall, but it's going to be stumbling for a while. The only reason he comes down here, now and then, to share some of his secrets, is that he can wipe them out just as quickly. He's not enough of a fool to think Pierce likes him, actually sees signs of unmasked contempt whenever Pierce deigns to look at him directly, but he listens all the same. It doesn't make a difference. 

He listens as Pierce explains his orders in a way he probably wouldn't bother do to with any of his agents. Some of them sound an awful lot like excuses – _I'm doing this for the good of the world, people will die but more people will never have to suffer because of it_ – but to his ears none of it sounds genuine. Pierce does what he does for one reason, and one reason only: because he can. His intent might have been noble at some point, but as it happens with leaders, they tangle themselves up in their own bullshit and believe their own lies more fiercely than anyone else. 

He listens as Pierce talks about his target, a man named Nicholas Fury, longer than he talks about hellicarriers and the algorithms and the plan. They'd been friends once, but now they're standing on opposite sites of a battle Pierce can't not win, and, however regrettable it might be to kill him, it can't be helped. 

Nicholas Fury, as it turns out, is a rather hard man to kill. And then there's the man on the bridge, the one who calls him Bucky and looks at him like he's found a long-lost treasure, with shock and wonder. He can't shake that image off no matter how hard he tries, like it's been burned into his brain, and worse, like it belongs there. 

He knows it's a mistake to ask Pierce about him. He thinks that may be part of why he does it. 

 

*** 

 

He jumps out of a crashing hellicarrier to dive after a man he does and doesn't know, drags his limp body out of the water, doesn't look back when he walks away. 

He's the Winter Soldier and he's someone's best friend and he's a deadly weapon in the shape of a man and he's Bucky Barnes. He's all of that, and he's none of it, and he can't keep any of this straight in his head. When he closes his eyes he sees a rundown apartment in Queens and his sister playing with a doll that's missing an arm and an eye, and he sees the lab back in Russia and the chair and the men in lab coats. He sees children running through a fountain and screaming in delight while he's sitting next to Steve who can't join them, because the water is too cold and he'll catch pneumonia if he has real bad luck and Steve always does. He sees people whose names he doesn't know and doesn't much care for on his knees in front of him, begging him to spare their lives, but orders are orders and it's not his decision. He's back in the war, cowering behind improvised hideouts in Italy with his riffle at the ready, or maybe he's up on a roof in London instead. He's in the lab and looking at a picture of Steve, and he's also in Austria, looking at Captain America for the first time from an operating table while his mind is still fogged by drugs and leftover adrenaline from whatever they'd done to him. 

The first night he spends underneath a bridge, cowering, not sleeping for a minute, but while the Winter Soldier in him might be content with the kind of safety that comes with being well hidden and not currently shot at, Bucky Barnes certainly isn't. He pick-pockets a few people that look like they can shoulder the loss of the change in their wallets, a skill he's never been proud of but that he's possessed since childhood, buys himself some new, less suspicious looking clothes and a room in the first motel he finds. 

His head is pounding so hard it makes his vision swim, but that's not the only reason he doesn't sleep much during the second night either. He's afraid that he'll awake blank, wiped once more, a weapon in the shape of James Buchanan Barnes, soldier, Howling Commando, Captain America's best friend. He doesn't know who he is or who he wants to be now, but he's going to figure that out, and he's sure it beats not being anyone at all. 

He sneaks around the hospital, following the man with the artificial wings, until Steve gets released healthy and well. He visits the Smithsonian, after he's googled his name – _his own name, he's got a name now_ – and goes to see the pictures and the uniforms, reads it all again on the displays in the exhibition. Some of that he remembers, some still feels like he's reading about another man's life, and when he goes back to his motel afterwards and looks into the mirror in the dingy bathroom for a good long while, it doesn't seem like he's looking at the same face at all. He does it again the next day, and the one after that. 

And then he makes a decision. 

 

*** 

 

Steve Rogers spends hardly a week in the hospital, and half of it upon insistence of doctors who don't know how his body works and don't want to risk being the one responsible for releasing Captain America too soon. He spends another week or two laying low at Sam's place, while Natasha steps in front of the congress and an army of cameras, feels bad for letting her handle that until he sees her tell them off with a sort of grace Steve himself never could have possessed. He lets the dust settle, as much as it'd ever settle around him. 

Four weeks after the Triskelion fell and all of SHIELD with it, Steve sits on a bench in Potomac Park to say goodbye to DC. He's read the file Natasha gave him over and over, and while it told him a lot of things about Bucky's past that he wishes weren't true, it didn't give him anything about where he might have disappeared to. None of the scattered agents who still consider themselves loyal to a cause Steve somehow came to stand for have seen him either, which is good news insofar as that it means Bucky at least didn't go straight back to Hydra. 

But wherever Bucky is, whatever he's doing now, Steve's come to the conclusion that he's not going to find him until he wants to be found. It's the hardest thing he's ever done, make the decision to wait Bucky out. But there's a place for him in New York, where he can help clean up the mess that Hydra made of the world, and to put that on hold in favor of a dead-end mission to chase after someone who's not ready to be caught seems oddly selfish. 

Steve's about to get up and leave, pick up his things from Sam's place and head for the private airport where one of Stark's jets has been waiting all morning, when someone sits down on the bench next to him. He tenses involuntarily, force of habit by now, and glances at the intruder, who looks harmless enough: jeans and a hoodie, a baseball cap hiding most of his face, gloved hands resting on his thighs, his pose stiff but nonthreatening. 

The man turns, and even though Steve still can't see much of his face as it's hidden by the cap, it's enough to recognize the silhouette. He's holding his breath, doesn't dare to hope, half-convinced he's seeing ghosts, his mind tricking him into believing something that's not there. 

“I never took you for the type to get much out of people-watching”, the man says. “Is that a side-effect of the serum or is that just you getting old?” 

“Bucky,” Steve says, dumbly. He wants to say so much more, but the words get stuck in his throat. What is he supposed to tell him? _I thought you were dead. I mourned you. I'm sorry I let them take you, turn you into... whatever it was that you became._ It all seems stupid and insignificant, too much and too little at the same time. 

“No. I'm not him. Not really, not right now. Maybe never again,” Bucky replies. He's turned away again, sitting there like a statue, unmoving, his back pressed to the back rest of the bench and his eyes straight ahead. “But I think I want to be.” 

And somehow, for now, that's enough.


End file.
